Sound propagation techniques determine how sound waves travel in a space and interact with the environment. In many applications, it is important to be able to simulate sound propagation in large scenes, such as games and training in both indoor and outdoor scenes, noise prediction in urban areas, and architectural acoustics design for buildings and interior spaces such as concert halls. Realistic acoustic effects can also improve the realism of a virtual environment. Acoustic phenomena such as interference, diffraction, and scattering for general scenes can only be captured by accurately solving the acoustic wave equation. The large spatial and frequency domain and accuracy requirement pose a significant challenge for acoustic techniques to be used in these diverse domains with different requirements.
Various techniques may be used in predicting or modeling sound propagation. However, current techniques are unable to efficiently perform acoustic classification and optimization for multi-modal rendering of real-world scenes.